Who blew up the house?

Thank's for the reply... yep, been watching ARTE...

This movie doesn't help me trying to understand the youth of the 60s.
If viewers aren't able to understand this movie today, I doubt that people understood it 30 years ago.

Maybe I should have watched "Sport clips" on DSF instead. Watching women undress and expose their boobs has more intellectual content than ZB. At least there's less of a chance to fall asleep...

I survived the 1960's and saw the movie first-run in 1970. Trust me. It made no more sense then than it does today.

One thing I'll say for it though is that it made at least some kind of lasting impression on me. Many years later when I had the opportunity to acquire the film on videocassette, I did. Somehow over the time since my first viewing of it I must have convinced myself that there must certainly have been more to the film than I had grasped the first time around. Viewing it again cured me of that theory.

The music soundtrack is another matter. I bought the record (vinyl, of course) shortly after seeing the film the first time. And I've since acquired a special edition 2-disk soundtrack CD (1997) of Zabriskie Point.

I still love the music; so who knows? Maybe deep down inside there's some part of me that likes something about the movie itself. Stranger things have happened. For example, I like 'My Dinner With Andre' and haven't even the vaguest idea why (wink).

Incidentally, I saw a movie the following year (1971) called 'Vanishing Point,' and I remember entertaining a suspicion that it was the film Zabriskie Point would rather have been. (Please don't ask me to explain that. I can't.)

Exactly right. Mainstream America doesn't come out of the film terribly well, to put it mildly (consisting essentially - in Antonioni's sharply-observed vision - of corporate despoilers, thuggish police, mean-spirited small-businessmen and philistine, lumpen-conformist, consumerist Mr and Mrs America (and Junior)), but this doesn't mean that our sympathies are supposed to rest firmly, automatically and unconditionally with the student rebels or with Mark Frechette and Daria (although she is almost certainly the most sympathetic of the available options).

What is it with you young people (I'm 52)? Are you so narcissistic or lacking in empathy that you must always have heroes and heroines that you can identify with, or simply-stated causes (spelt out in letters six feet high just in case anyone misses the point) that you can subscribe to? Have you altogether lost the capacity to cope with ambiguity or uncertainty?

This film was never likely to be a commercial success, even at the time of its release, and - given the collapse in the rigour of public education that has gathered pace in the intervening 40 years or so - it is even less likely to be understood or appreciated now. There is plenty of simple-mindedly distracting fodder currently available at your local multiplex if you don't want to make the fairly modest mental effort a film like this demands.

To me Zabriskie Point is a model of narrative clarity, and Antonioni's contempt for the existing establishment and his reservations about the moral and intellectual coherence of the would-be rebels are conveyed subtly but forcefully. (Rather like the improvisatory instrumentals of the Pink Floyd and the Grateful Dead that constitute most of the soundtrack, the freewheeling core of the film is bookended (and contextualised) by tighter thematic statements.)

oooh those evil nasty tricks that European Directors try, let us thank our regime that we have found them out, those corrigible puppet stooges!!

I think, as a European who has spent time in America myself, Antonioni understood America extremely well. It isn't too difficult to understand that at one time young people thought that they could make a real difference, they thought that the world could be better but they were confused and frustrated at the same time.

Antonioni seems to be predicting the unstoppable advancement of America - it's relentless obliteration of other cultural ideals in the face of overwhelming capitalism. I'm not saying this is wrong or right just that it has happened and continues to unabated.

I like America i think it is a wonderful place and it has an admirable set of ideals as its core but there is a lot of things wrong in the culture and i believe that Antonioni tried to bring this to the surface unfortunately his cinema language is very difficult to understand and it passed plenty of people by. I love this film i think it is truly unique.

well my american friend..We (europeans) can easily understand whats going on in your country..It has been, and it is today (even worst) very much like Antonioni shows it...And most of all, (wait and see), the last seen, sooner or later is going to be the final act of the American dream...

I think you're on to something with yor comments both about Antonioni's motivation -- doing something because it was cool to see -- and the way we Americans grovel before and enrich anything that comes from an European perspective. To me , the characcters were detached in much the same way that Mersault in The Stranger was detached. They also kind of remind me of the Beat generation with their alienation and coolness. I saw the movie back in my youth when it first was released -- I was with a bunch of UCLA anthro students who were so detached and so cool that Charles Manson could have walked through the door and someone would have handed him a beer and asked him
"...hey, what's happenin' Dude?"